Mike Pence’s Marriage and the Beliefs That Keep Women from Power

It’s one thing for somebody like Mike Pence to avoid women who make him feel a certain way; it’s another to avoid women as a group and as a rule.

Photograph by Joe Raedle / Getty

Seventy days into the Trump Presidency, many of us find ourselves discussing the propriety of a married man eating a meal in the company of a woman who is not his wife. Vice-President Mike Pence—a hard-line evangelical who has repeatedly called himself “a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order”—refuses to dine extramaritally, or, at least, he said as much to the Hill, in 2002. If he eats alone with a woman, that woman is Karen Pence; if he attends an event where alcohol is served and “people are being loose,” he prefers that his wife be present and standing close to him. The recent Washington Post piece that resurfaced these details quotes Ken Blackwell, one of President Trump’s transition-team advisers, on Mr. and Mrs. Pence: “You can’t get a dime between them.”

As soon as the piece was published, ostentatious and divided reactions immediately flooded Twitter. Matt Walsh, a conservative Christian blogger, asked, “Seriously what’s the appropriate reason for a married person to go out for a meal alone with a member of the other sex (outside of family)?” Erick Erickson, also a conservative Christian blogger, replied, with apparent seriousness, “planning your spouse’s surprise party or funeral and that is it.” The jokes came quickly: “honey it’s not what you think- we were planning your surprise funeral,” one person wrote. Others were earnestly horrified. How could you rule out meals with a person of the opposite gender over the course of an entire career? That Pence was able to do so speaks to an incredible level of inequity in the workplace; no successful woman could ever abide by the same rule. How could you sex-segregate a thrice-daily activity and still engage in civic life? (One married man told Walsh that he used to plan church-choir practices with his married female colleague over dinners out at the local Chinese buffet.) And how, without occasionally going out for a sandwich, could a married man ever make or keep female friends?

Because I was raised in a Southern Baptist community in Texas, the answer to that last question is still ingrained within me: a married man simply shouldn’t have female friends. It’s not necessary or proper. That’s what plenty of people I grew up around might say. Men and women are meant to serve God in a contained, organized partnership. Intimacy of any sort leads to sexual temptation; a man’s wife is the only woman outside of his birth family who should rightfully play a meaningful role in his life. In evangelical circles, there’s a name for the most extreme manner of self-regulation: to refuse to eat, travel, or meet alone with a woman is to follow the “Billy Graham rule,” which stems from a story that the famous pastor told about walking into a hotel room and finding a naked woman, bent on destroying his ministry, sprawled across his bed. After this incident, which carries a whiff of the tall tale—it is perhaps the type of story one tells to explain a much more common situation—Graham invoked his restrictions.

Prophylactic gender separatism can be found in conservative strains of other religions, of course. In framing extramarital interaction with women as categorically dangerous, Pence has something in common with fundamentalist Muslims and Orthodox Jews. And the basic idea isn’t just the province of the devout or conservative—or even, really, the province of men. Gender essentialism—and, more specifically, the abiding sense that women are sources of sexual danger—is so entrenched that people of all political orientations, including women, get married and then semiconsciously shrink their social lives so that only friends and close colleagues of the same sex remain.

By and large, there’s nothing wrong with living by whatever works for your marriage, your temperament, and your principles. And the outrage directed at Mike Pence’s chastity-belted Google calendar stems in part from many liberals' unfamiliarity with conservative religious mores—as well as a gleefully voyeuristic interest in the striking details of Pence’s marital life. (The two that keep resurfacing: he calls his wife “Mother,” and she engraved a gold cross with the word “Yes” and stashed it in her purse in preparation for his proposal.) Infidelity can be corrosive in marriages worth preserving, and guarding oneself against sexual deceit is a bipartisan practice. The revered progressive writer Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote, in 2012, that he “believes in guard-rails” when it comes to his marriage, and “in being absolutely clear with myself about why I am having a second drink, and why I am not.” This quote, naturally, has been circulating among conservatives on Twitter as proof that liberals are hypocritical, and that Coates and Pence are essentially the same.

But it’s one thing to avoid a particular situation involving a particular woman who makes you feel a certain way; it’s another entirely to avoid all women as a group and as a rule because of the abstract possibility of sexual temptation. It’s telling, and extremely disheartening, that many people can’t tell the difference—that knowing the best thing to do for your partnership and subscribing wholesale to an idea about gender that calcifies woman as secondary could plausibly seem like the same thing. The Pence approach rules out a lunch meeting or a professional dinner with a woman. It also “included requiring that any aide who had to work late to assist him be male.” As National Journal reported two years ago, other congressmen had similar policies, in some cases to avoid the appearance of impropriety—a policy that, the Journal noted, may very well violate laws against discrimination in the workplace. Certainly, this approach is likely to lead to more all-male meetings of the sort we have seen so frequently in the early days of the Trump Administration. And, outside the professional world, it seems well nigh impossible to view a group of people as fully human if you refuse, categorically, to have them as friends.

One can imagine some version of these rules that applies equally to both genders and exists in a utopia where men and women have the same share of governmental power. But that is not where these rules come from, and that is not the world we live in. At play here are two basic evangelical ideas. The first is complementarianism, which finds beauty in the idea of men and women holding rigid, separate roles: men lead and women provide support for men. In complementarianism, women are intended to find worth and agency through obedience and submission. There are plenty of women, as well as men, who believe that this is a fundamental truth about human life, and they are free to do so—but when that conviction is allowed to shape public policy the result is a repressive and theocratic state. The second evangelical idea here is that Pence and his fellow hard-liners are simply making the most honest attempt possible to reckon with human sin. The problem is that women always end up bearing the burden of that reckoning. If we are framed as temptresses, our only power is sex. It’s remarkable, and depressing, that the top two people in American government agree so colorfully on this matter. Trump may be blatantly irreligious and Pence exotically devout, but our President and Vice-President come together quite well in their stated inability to resist women. Trump bragged about grabbing them by the pussy. Pence merely prefers to eat alone.

Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her first book, the essay collection “Trick Mirror,” will be published in August.

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